Heterology as Aesthetics: Bataille,Sovereign Art and the Affirmation of Impossibility

Heterology and the Homogenization of the Universe

Those familiar with Bataille’s oeuvre will be surprised to see him lumped into a category that he so vehemently rejected in his early writings, when he seems to only have used the word aesthetic as an insult to denounce what he perceived to be the pretentiousness of the Surrealist movement, in particular of its leader André Breton, ‘the old aesthete and false revolutionary’ (2006a: 28). Yet in contrast to what a cursory reading of his work might suggest, there is a significant affinity between Bataille’s thought and the history of aesthetics, which, however, only becomes absolutely manifest in his postwar work. In order to grasp the extent of this proposed affinity, it is necessary to turn to of one of his earliest concepts, the idea of heterology, or ‘the science of what is completely other’ (1985: 102).

In ‘The Use Value of D.A.F. de Sade’ from 1930, Bataille argues that one of the most fundamental activities of the human mind is to establish homogeneous relations in the world by ‘replacing a priori inconceivable objects with classified series of conceptions or ideas’ (1985: 96). This, he asserts, is also the chief duty of philosophy and of science: to impose order by ‘converting’ concrete material reality into abstract measurements and organizing the resulting abstractions within stable and coherent structures (be it in the form of Hegel’s all-encompassing philosophical system or quantum mechanics). However, this activity, the homogenization of the world, inevitably produces what Bataille calls intellectual ‘waste products’, notions that cannot be contained by the ordering discourses of science and philosophy. An example of this ‘intellectual waste’ can be found in a short piece entitled ‘Formless’, where Bataille considers the shape or form of the universe and concludes that it is essentially without form, resembles nothing and can therefore never be sensibly appropriated by systematic thought. As Bataille sarcastically remarks, ‘for academic men to be happy, the universe would have to take shape’, it would have to be made to wear ‘a mathematical frock coat’ (1985: 31). That is to say, the objectification of the infinite, formless universe is possible only on the condition that its heterogeneous ‘properties’ (infinity, formlessness) are excluded.

In addition to the notion of the universe, other examples for heterogeneous elements to consistently feature in Bataille’s oeuvre include the sacred, the impure, the debased, the transcendent, death, but also chance, laughter, exuberance, madness, rage, slothfulness and the rejection of seriousness – in other words, anything that resists the objectifying discourse of the sciences or actively challenges their detached sobriety. However, as Allan Stoekl rightly observes, ‘there is nothing inherently heterogeneous-repulsive, nonappropriable – in shit or in anything else. It is the relation of that element, that object to a system in which it cannot be given a stable position’ (2007: 21). This implies that the homogeneous and the heterogeneous can never exist independently from one another, as every homogeneous structure, utterance or idea is inevitably based on an act of exclusion, which generates both the positive rational content (the word, the concept, the idea) as well as the excluded part (the heterogeneous, the other).

Now, for Bataille, heterology is precisely (and paradoxically) the scientific and rigorous inquiry into those elements necessarily excluded by science and rational thought. The logical outcome of such an operation can only be twofold: it can, firstly, result in the ultimate homogenization of heterogeneous elements, in their assimilation to system and order. Here the universe becomes merely another object with clearly defined attributes and heterology remains analogous to other systems of appropriation such as science and philosophy: ‘the pure and simple objectification of [its] specific character would lead to [its] incorporation in a homogenous intellectual system’ (1985: 98). Secondly, and more importantly for the present purpose, heterology leads to an awareness of the fundamental limit between the heterogeneous and the homogeneous, which, from a theoretical perspective, always remains untraversable. Thus ‘only … the process of limitation … lie[s] within the province of heterology as science’ (1985: 97). In other words, the heterogeneous ‘element remains indefinable and can only be determined through negation’, i.e. in relation to what it is not (1985: 98). This means that heterology ultimately reveals nothing but the impossibility of rationally interpreting or even grasping ‘heterogeneous elements’. Yet this impossibility must not be understood as a simple capitulation in the face of total otherness, but rather as an exploration of the limit, of that which marks a radical barrier between thought and what is excluded by thought. Thus, in opposition to Hegel’s totalizing idealism, which proposes the incorporation of the excluded as excluded within the ‘Idea’, Bataille insists on the ultimate impossibility of hypostatizing this exclusion (see Hegel, 1979). Any direct attempt at grasping the heterogeneous, at conceptualizing the other of conceptual thought, will always necessarily fall short of its intention. One therefore has to insist (even against some of Bataille’s own claims) that heterology, as a ‘rigorous inquiry’, can never itself be heterogeneous, as it is always bound by the logical necessities and structures of reason. It can only ever be an affirmation of heterogeneity through the recognition of the latter’s logical impossibility. In short, heterology is itself a homogeneous discourse.

The Impossibility of the Heterogeneous: Appearance and/as Reality

From this perspective heterology seems to create yet another version of the traditional theoretical opposition between appearance and reality, in which the heterogeneous would occupy a function similar to Kant’s noumena, Plato’s forms, or Freud’s elements of the unconscious. In ‘The Psychological Structure of Fascism’, Bataille acknowledges the similarity of his notion with Freud’s theory: ‘The exclusion of heterogeneous elements from the homogenous realm of consciousness formally recalls the exclusion of the elements, described (by psychoanalysis) as unconscious, which censorship excludes from the conscious ego’ (1985: 141). Both, the heterogeneous and the unconscious, represent an idea of the totally other, of the beyond of conscious life. The crucial point of divergence must be located in their respective ideas on the possibility of accessing this other of conscious thought, of turning it into an object of knowledge. While Freud establishes a science of the unconscious (psychoanalysis), Bataille insists on the fundamental unassimilability of this ‘other’ for any conceptual discourse. As Hollier puts it, the heterogeneous ‘is not even a thing because every thing by definition is nameable and corresponds to a concept’ (Hollier, 1992: 102). Yet this radical otherness is not situated below or beyond the homogeneous world (as in traditional or contemporary accounts of the appearance-reality dichotomy, such as Kant’s notion of the ‘thing-in-itself’) but is intimately intertwined with the latter in that it constitutes the necessary limit that makes a homogenous, limited, structured world possible in the first place. In this sense it is probably closest to Nietzsche’s notion of the Dionysian realm of excess and limitlessness, which provides the dark background against which the light and form of Apollo may appear (see Nietzsche, 2003).

In Nietzsche, the ‘realm’ of Dionysus can never be grasped unless, as Peter Sloterdijk puts it, through ‘Apollonian quotation marks, i.e., the imperative of enunciation, symbolization, disembodiment and representation’ (Sloterdijk, 1986: 54). Apollo, the god of appearance, form and illusion, thus comes to represent the only communicable, and therefore, to a certain extent, the only truly existent ‘reality’, at whose glimmering borders one may merely surmise the dark Dionysian chaos, always already out of reach. Nietzsche’s Dionysus and Bataille’s heterogeneity may therefore not be conceived of as primal essences or underlying grounds of being. Both should rather be considered as signs announcing, within the Apollonian/homogeneous realm, the limit of conceptual thought and its inevitable reliance on the unsignifiable.

Nonetheless, as Hegel would object, merely to state that something is excluded, beyond thought, or untranslatable, already constitutes a form of rational translation and introduces a certain homogeneity with respect to the ‘element’ in question. Bataille, a discerning reader of Hegel, therefore argues that the only way to counter the inevitable theoretical appropriation or ‘dilution’ of the heterogeneous is through ‘the practical part of heterology, which leads to an action that goes resolutely against this regression to homogenous nature’ (1985: 98). In other words, although heterology can ‘acknowledge’ the heterogeneous, the latter can only ever manifest itself in practice. Still, the heterogeneous needs heterology to attest to its heterogeneous character, to affirm the impossibility of grasping it, without which it would simply ‘dissolve fatally in a region where no thought and word would have the slightest consequence’ (1985: 80). This means that heterology as a scientific inquiry only allows the heterogeneous to manifest itself in discourse as both the necessary betrayal of heterogeneous elements and the conscious affirmation of this betrayal. From a heterological perspective the notion of a noumenal depth, as something that exists below (or beyond) language, thought and appearance, is therefore not merely impossible, it is – quite literally – the impossible.

Heterogeneity and Its Effects: The Disruption of Stability and Utility

The notion of the heterogeneous as a practice that is radically unavailable to rational thought and whose unavailability must nonetheless be articulated as clearly and meticulously as possible has two basic consequences, which are essential to an understanding of Bataille’s later conception of art. ⁴ Firstly, Bataille argues, it must be studied through the emotional effect it has on the subject, which Bataille divides into two basic categories, attraction and repulsion: ‘it is possible to assume that the object of any affective reaction is necessarily heterogeneous … there is sometimes attraction, sometimes repulsion’ (1985: 142). This implies that we only become aware of the heterogeneous through our emotional response to it, which, however, does not tell us anything about its ontological status. To make this clear we can once more return to the example of the universe, a notion to which, from a Bataillean perspective, three responses are possible: scientific, religious and heterological.

A scientific analysis of the universe would tell us something about its basic properties, such as atomic and subatomic particles, the laws governing its emergence and development, and its future trajectory. A religious interpretation would see in its magnitude the mysterious presence and power of god, its creator. Both responses, scientific and religious, thereby introduce a reassuring regularity, stability or purpose. ⁵ A heterological approach, on the other hand, would attempt to intensify, or at least acknowledge, the extreme confusion, absurdity or even horror the notion of an infinite space, without direction or purpose, might produce, a response which science or religion are designed to assuage. Thus, in opposition to traditional philosophical theories (Bataille here explicitly refers to Kantian metaphysics) that accommodate the unknowable by establishing a ‘sufficient identification … of an unknowable (noumenal) world with the known (phenomenal) world’ (1985: 96) to keep the disruptive force of the aporetic to a minimum, heterology wants to sustain and intensify this disruption. This does not mean, however, that Bataille rejects science and philosophy tout court. But the reason why he calls for a heterological investigation in the first place lies in his realization that their sobriety and ineluctable interpretative schemas preclude an emotive, fantastical, unreasoned and, in a sense, liberated response to life and existence:

Philosophy has been up to this point, as much as science, an expression of human subordination, and when man seeks to represent himself, no longer as moment of a homogeneous process – of a necessary and pitiful process – but as a new laceration within a lacerated nature … he can no longer recognize himself in the degrading chains of logic, but he recognizes himself instead … in the virulence of his own phantasms. (1985: 80)

Surrealism and the Heterogeneity of Art

This brief delineation of the heterogeneous as something that resists conceptualization and utility, manifests itself in the affective life of the subject, only ever emerges in practice, and is always in opposition to ‘everyday life’ (1985: 143), suggests that art might constitute one of its prime manifestations in modern society. In ‘The Use Value of D.A.F. de Sade’, Bataille briefly entertains this idea: ‘poetry … permits one to accede to an entirely heterogeneous world’, because the ‘practical unreality of the heterogeneous elements it sets in motion is, in fact, an indispensable condition for the continuation of heterogeneity’ (1985: 97). This means that the heterogeneous always needs to be unreal, fictional, as any claim to reality (to an unambiguous ontology) would immediately render it vulnerable to philosophical appropriation. Yet despite applauding their phantasmic nature, Bataille immediately rejects art and poetry on the basis that their autonomy, their detachment from ‘vulgar reality’, creates ‘aesthetic homogeneities’, which ultimately deprive the heterogeneous of its truly disruptive force and thus, like religion, science and philosophy, reduce it to ‘playing the role of the standard of things’ (1985: 97).

In Bataille’s prewar work his rejection of art and aesthetics is always closely bound up with his rejection of Bretonian Surrealism, which he accuses of an unworldly and naïve idealism: ‘all of existence conceived of as purely literary by M. Breton, diverts him from the shabby, sinister, or inspired events occurring all around him from what constitutes the real decomposition’ (1985: 41). The Surrealists, as is well known, not only championed art and poetry as prime manifestations of the surreal in modern life but also as models for a revolutionary activity, aimed at a total aestheticization of life and existence. ⁶ Like Bataille’s notion of the heterogeneous, Breton’s conception of the surreal was based on categories traditionally excluded from science and philosophy, such as the unconscious, dreams, violence and madness. Yet in Bataille’s estimate, by aestheticizing these elements and thus ‘hiding in the wonderland of poetry’ (1985: 29), Breton turned them into ‘pretentious idealistic aberrations’ (1985: 32). In order not to be tainted by the idealism of Breton’s surreality, Bataille’s concept of heterogeneity therefore needed to remain clearly separate from art, poetry and aesthetic considerations of any kind. However, Bataille’s outright rejection of art and aesthetics contains an unacknowledged prejudice, a blurring of categories, which is helpful in illustrating his own initial rejection of the heterogeneous dimension of art. In light of the failure of the historical avant-garde to effect real political change, his insistence on the naiveté of the Surrealists’ belief in the revolutionary power of art and poetry today seems justified: ‘Servile idealism rests precisely in this will to poetic agitation’ (1985: 41). Yet what Bataille seems to fail to realize at this point is that an aestheticization of the heterogeneous aspects of life for political purposes is not the same as an insistence on the heterogeneous ‘nature’ of art and poetry.

Bataille, like the Surrealists, was disgusted with ‘the bankruptcy of bourgeois culture’ (1985: 32). and his early thought not only sought to ‘analyse’ the heterogeneous but to unleash its destructive force for revolutionary purposes: ‘to abolish all exploitation of man by man is not the only motive that links the practical development of heterology to the overturning of the established order’ (1985: 100). From the very start of his career, and very consciously against the aesthetico-revolutionary aspirations of the Surrealists, he insisted on the inability of aesthetics and art to reach the uneducated masses and thus to bring about real social change: ‘What cannot move the heart of a ditchdigger already has the existence of shadows’ (1985: 43). Bataille’s main aim up until the outbreak of the Second World War, in groups such as the Collège de sociologie, Contre-Attaque and Acéphale, was to establish, on a practical as well as on a theoretical level, how the heterogeneous could potentially be instrumentalized for political, revolutionary purposes: ‘an organized understanding of the movements in society, of attraction and repulsion, starkly represents itself as a weapon’ (1985: 159). ⁷ Yet this attempt is undermined from the very beginning by a fundamental and often only implicitly acknowledged contradiction: if, as we have seen, the heterogeneous is defined as that which negates utility and instrumentalization, in other words, if it is to remain ‘valid in itself’, then any attempt to turn it into a tool for political purposes, for ends other than itself, immediately deprives it of its heterogeneous character.

Thus, while Bataille’s dismissal of the Surrealists’ attempt to use art as a political tool was certainly pertinent, his own ambition to channel the heterogeneous as a revolutionary force was equally ineffective, as it was haunted from the very start by an immanent contradiction. Bataille had always been more or less aware of the paradox underlying his project, but he did not explicitly address it until after the war, when, prompted by the emergence and proliferation of Existentialism and the seeming demise of the pre-war avant-garde, he returned to questions of political action and its connection to aesthetic representation as it had surfaced in his initial altercations with Surrealism. Bataille now invoked what he perceived to be the true tenets of Breton’s movement against Sartre’s influential idea of literary engagement. ⁸ Although he never wavered in his insistence on the political uselessness of art and poetry, this new intellectual climate saw him fundamentally reconsider his previous position on both the potentially heterogeneous nature of art and the political dimension of heterogeneity.

Sovereignty, or Bataille’s Reconfiguration of the Heterogeneous

This reconsideration is concurrent with a significant shift in Bataille’s nomenclature. Whereas prior to the war Bataille’s theoretical work is largely devoted to analysing heterogeneity, his postwar writing increasingly abandons this term in favour of a different notion, which is directly derived from it and comes to occupy a similar position in his theoretical reflections: the idea of sovereignty (or the sovereign experience). One of the crucial differences, however, is that this concept is now explicitly given an aesthetic dimension. In The Unfinished System of Nonknowledge, which remained unpublished during his lifetime, Bataille states unambiguously, ‘instead of the sovereignty of an aesthetico-ethical God it is the sovereignty of the aesthetic that I pose’ (2004: 172). What exactly constitutes the aesthetic dimension of sovereignty? According to Bataille sovereignty, like heterogeneity, eludes every form of theoretical or philosophical appropriation. True sovereignty, as Christoph Menke has shown, must therefore be seen ‘not as the freedom of self-determination but as self-questioning, self-transgression’ (1999: 308–9, my translation). This sovereign negation has two crucial components, one temporal and one spatial: it implies, firstly, a suspension of the ‘concern for the future’, which normally characterizes human action, and, secondly, a breakdown of the subject-object dichotomy, in which the subject, in its dissolution, is withdrawn from the order of things. ⁹ This dissolution, however, can never be grasped with the conventional tools of cognition, as the latter always relies on a stable, perceiving subject. In the absence of a solid epistemological foundation, a truly sovereign experience, akin to the shock of the heterogeneous, can only be described negatively, in relation to what it is not: ‘The main thing is always the same: sovereignty is NOTHING’ (Bataille, 1993: 430).

This postulated epistemological abyss of the sovereign experience is clearly an extension of Bataille’s earlier reflections on the non-cognitive dimension of the heterogeneous. Yet whereas Bataille had previously clung to the possibility that this immediacy can somehow be accessed directly and thus used for political ends, he now reconfigures it as a desire for an absolute immediacy, which implies that it must always remain unfulfilled, out of reach, impossible. In The Tears of Eros Bataille explicitly states that this desire for immediacy is at the basis of his conception of the aesthetic: ‘it has meaning only in this instant of transfiguration, wherein we pass precisely from use value to ultimate value, a value independent from any effect beyond the instant itself, and which is fundamentally an aesthetic value’ (2001: 70).

In Bataille’s last published work before his death, the aesthetic is thus rehabilitated as designating a desire for a radical immediacy, for an affective experience outside the limiting and temporalizing structures of language and reason. In contrast to his earlier discourse on the heterogeneous, however, the aesthetic no longer ‘presents itself as a weapon’, as a concrete possibility, but rather indicates a conscious and sovereign affirmation of the impossibility of ever transposing it into the realms of knowledge and future-oriented action: ‘The moment of sovereignty’s appearance must decisively prevail over the “political” and financial consequences of its manifestation’ (1990: 41).

Sovereign Art and Contemporary Aesthetics

Bataille’s postwar reconfiguration of the heterogeneous as aesthetic immediacy is concurrent with a renewed focus on the social meaning or function of art, literature and poetry. ¹⁰ In Literature and Evil, from 1957, poetry is defined as ‘the means by which [man] can escape from being reduced to the reflection of things’, in other words, as an escape from the homogenizing and objectifying discourses of science and philosophy. However, ‘the very means of avoiding reduction to the reflection of things constitute a desire for the impossible’ (2006b: 45). Sovereign art, as it is developed in Bataille’s later work, is a conscious display of its illusory character, a medium which addresses and answers this desire for the beyond of objectivity without, however, charging it with a specific truth content or telos. Yet sovereign art not only addresses itself to this need but also, due to its fictional, unreal, phantasmic nature, ultimately reveals the impossibility of ever satisfying it. Connecting Bataille’s earlier work on the heterogeneous with his later reflections on sovereignty, one could thus claim that the purpose of sovereign art lies in the dramatization of both the desire and the inevitable failure to ever access the heterogeneous; it provides an experience of radical alterity, which is simultaneously an experience of its (logical) impossibility. As Carolyn J. Dean aptly describes it: ‘The heterogeneous or other can thus be rendered only as art, as spectacle, through a mimetic gesture that gives expression to its unassimilable forces’ (1992: 229).

Bataille’s conception of sovereign art, as something that essentially withdraws from discourse, exhibits certain similarities with Graham Harman’s object-oriented ontology, which claims that the essential feature of all objects lies in their withdrawal from or unavailability to precise or exhaustive definition. In an essay on the fiction of H.P. Lovecraft, Harman argues that philosophy and art are similar in that they both probe but never fully explain this withdrawal (see Harman, 2008). While Harman’s account is illuminating regarding the potential strangeness of all objects, he nonetheless fails to consider that philosophy, by systematizing this strangeness, inevitably reduces it. It thereby (to use Bataille’s diction) deprives the strange of its heterogeneous character. In the fiction of H.P. Lovecraft or Edgar Allan Poe, the strange, uncanny or heterogeneous can be experienced because they are not subsumed within a general theory of strangeness, which would immediately diminish the feeling of horror and confusion their stories so masterfully provoke. In order for sovereign art (such as the works of Lovecraft) to have the desired effect (confusion, elation, attraction, repulsion, etc.) its aesthetic sovereignty needs to resist the anaesthetic effects of theory. In Bataille’s essay on William Blake he clarifies this point in relation to ‘the confusion that is provoked’ (2006b: 94) by the works of the English poet. Here the attempts of criticism and philosophy to account for this confusion by forcing it into some kind of conceptual straightjacket are likened to a state of sleep, which always petrifies and numbs the sovereign power of the work: ‘As we try to escape from it, we pass from waking and awareness of the confusion to the sleep of logical explanation’ (2006b: 94).

Bataille’s later account of art is closer to Rancière’s delineation of Schiller’s aesthetic theory, which also insists on the radical incongruence between heterogeneous art and homogeneous thought: ‘Free appearance is the power of the heterogeneous sensible element … it is foreign to all volition, to every combination of means and end … inaccessible for the thought, desires and ends of the subject contemplating it’ (2009: 34). However, unlike Schiller, for whom, according to Rancière, ‘this strangeness … this radical unavailability … bears the mark of man’s full humanity and the promise of a humanity to come, one at last in tune with the fullness of its essence’ (2009: 34), Bataille’s conception of sovereign art is radically divorced from any notion of utopian fulfillment. In the third part of The Accursed Share, simply entitled Sovereignty, he explains the difference between traditional forms of sovereignty (such as the idea of god, the feudal lord or the fascist leader) and his notion of sovereign art: ‘Sovereign art is such only in the renunciation of, indeed in the repudiation of the functions and the power assumed by real sovereignty. From the viewpoint of power, sovereign art is an abdication. It throws the responsibility for managing things back onto things themselves’ (1993: 421). In his work of the 1930s, as we have seen, art is rejected because of its lack of revolutionary or political leverage. In Bataille’s later work this lack of efficacy in the socio-political realm becomes the mark of its sovereignty, of its sovereign rejection of responsibility and accountability. Bataille now insists that the much decried distance or separation between the artistic and the political realm in modern society needs to be maintained or even made more trenchant, as any attempt at fusion would instantly compromise art’s sovereign immediacy, its freedom to celebrate confusion, disorder and incoherence. ¹¹ For this reason it should never be expected to create blueprints or models for a possible future society: ‘I have continually placed the present moment against a concern for the future and for me poetry is defined by concern for the present moment’ (2006a: 86).

Conversely, political action is now placed squarely in the realm of the homogeneous, as it is always guided by a concern for the future, which, according to Bataille’s definition, is a rational concern. Every work of art is always an act ‘against the unacceptable world of rational utility’ (2006a: 70), as it is aimed at an experience of immediacy beyond the practical and future-oriented considerations of everyday life. However, ‘the refusal this involves would gain from not being confounded with the reasoned refusal of unreasonable conditions of life’ (2006a: 70). In other words, it would be a mistake to attempt to enlist the heterogeneous, immediate nature of art and poetry to combat the ‘unreasonable conditions of life’, as this always requires a sober analysis of those conditions, devoid of the effusive powers of attraction and repulsion: ‘the mastery of [intellectual aptitude] remains the key to rigorous emancipation’ (2006a: 50). Bataille’s postwar insistence on the separation between these two spheres, the political/rational (homogeneous) and artistic/aesthetic (heterogeneous), then presents an attempt to solve the immanent contradiction that surfaced in his initial theory of heterogeneity. If, as we have seen, the sovereign/heterogeneous is posited as that which resists instrumentalization (for revolutionary or utopian goals), this new disassociation is not only warranted but implicit in Bataille’s account of heterogeneity from the very first. He now argues that the attempt to apply the heterogeneous to the realm of homogeneity, the immediate to mediating categories, art to politics, constitutes a disservice to both realms: on the one hand it denies the effusive, strange, opaque dimension of the sovereign artwork and reduces the latter to the flatness of a formula or a service rendered: ‘In modes of thought in which the rational and the poetic remain confounded, the mind cannot elevate itself to the conception of poetic liberty, it subordinates the instant to some ulterior goal’ (2006a: 65). On the other hand, to infuse politics with the perplexing power of the heterogeneous precludes a clearheaded and rational appraisal of the real conditions of social life, which is a prerequisite for any meaningful attempt to bring about political change.

Although Bataille never formulated or developed a ‘heterological aesthetics’, one might legitimately ask what such a notion would entail. In a very fundamental sense it would address itself to the same question that John Roberts has identified at the heart of Badiou’s inaesthetics: ‘how, and to what ends, and with what means, is the notion of art as a ‘thing apart” to be theorized?’ (2008: 279). Badiou postulates a fundamental difference between knowledge and truth, whereby truth, unlike the conceptualizing imperative of knowledge, comes about through fidelity to the event, which is always singular, beyond any identifiable or verifiable content, and in this respect similar to Bataille’s notion of the heterogeneous. In a second step, akin to Bataille’s insistence on the necessity of affirming the impossible nature of the heterogeneous, Badiou’s evental aesthetics also call for an affirmation of the fundamental impossibility at the heart of the event; Badiou calls this ‘the point of impasse, or the point of impossibility, which precisely allows us to think the situation as a whole’ (2002: 121). The crucial point of divergence must be located in their respective ideas on the political implications of this impossibility. As Benjamin Noys has argued vis-à-vis Badiou’s position: ‘In identifying the necessity for this relation of rupture as an essential part of the mechanism of affirmation Badiou returns art to a certain form of relation to the political that he had tried to distance it from’ (Noys, 2009: 391). In other words, whereas Badiou insists that ‘emancipatory politics always consists in making seem possible precisely that which, from within the situation, is declared to be impossible’, and thus ultimately subordinates the impossible to the possible, the aesthetic to epistemic, the heterogeneous event to the homogeneity of political emancipation, a heterological approach would attempt to account for this separateness by insisting on the impossibility of ever reducing otherness, as it is manifested in art, to a specific form of politics or emancipation. ¹²

Heterological Aesthetics and the Tension between Autonomy and Heteronomy

In this sense, Bataille’s heterological aesthetics is close to Kant’s conception of aesthetic autonomy, which also construes the work of art as being resistant to utility (‘a purposiveness without purpose’; 2007: 62ff.) and conceptualization (‘beauty ought to be unsayable’; 1996: 62). Yet whereas for Kant the aesthetic experience is ultimately an expression of an ethically significant harmony between reason and sense perception, between objective universality and subjective feeling, a sovereign experience only arises on the basis of a fundamental discrepancy between reason and affectivity, between homogeneous thought and heterogeneous matter. As already indicated, Bataille’s heterological aesthetics stands in stark contrast to all conceptions of art as a tool for political change, emancipation or moral education. Although sovereign art needs to be autonomous from social reality, it only derives its sovereignty through a rejection of every form of power or influence, i.e. through the autonomous negation of its own autonomy (cf. Ebeling, 2000: 265). Sovereignty, as that which refuses objectivity and responsibility, should never be confused with power, which is a political category and thus belongs to the homogeneous sphere of reason and utility.

This radical negativity would thus seem to constitute a variation of Adorno’s notion of aesthetic negativity, which is probably the most profound exploration, in the 20th century, of the tension between the autonomous and heteronomous dimensions of art (see Adorno, 1997). Analogous to Bataille’s heterology, Adorno’s aesthetic theory posits a negative residue at the heart of the aesthetic experience that remains external to subjective appropriation and thus produces dissonance and disruption. In Adorno’s theory of aesthetic autonomy, however, the modern artwork’s disruption of utility becomes a sign of political resistance in a world dominated by instrumental reason. Only by virtue of its complete separation from the reifying praxis of capitalism can it still make valid, critical statements about society, not in terms of its manifest content, however, but only by means of a complete and formal resistance to appropriation, which Adorno calls its ‘truth-content’ (1997: 35ff.). Thus, against Kant, Adorno clings to a Hegelian notion of truth in art. I would argue that this also places him in close proximity to Bataille’s position. Although Bataille, like Adorno, rejects the idea that art could ever be fully translated into abstract categories, the truth of art still has to be identified/affirmed in its negativity/non-identity, or, as Bataille calls it, in its impossibility. The task of a heterological aesthetics, to attest to this impossibility, would thus indicate art’s heteronomy with regard to the rational requirements of philosophical discourse.

Yet, whereas Adorno’s negativity is historically contingent (for him the overcoming of capitalism – and, to be fair, Adorno is very pessimistic about this prospect – could potentially entail the eradication of negativity and produce a state of affairs in which art and society are reconciled; 1991: 98ff.), Bataille’s notion of sovereignty constitutes an attempt to articulate a trans- or even ahistorical form of negativity. Even in a society free from instrumental reason and capitalist reification, a genuinely sovereign art, in its rejection of meaning and purpose, would still have to be negative in relation to the status quo. In other words, in order to unfold its sovereign force, it is always dependent on the social reality it negates and thus heteronomous, albeit negatively, with regard to the latter. Although Bataille would concur with Adorno and Hegel that art always needs to be considered in its specific historical context, he claims that since heterogeneity is cognitively inaccessible, in other words, since it has no definable essence which could render it present and intelligible once and for all without destroying its ‘heterogeneous quality’, the expression given to it necessarily varies in different ages, while also remaining the same, as the impossible other of sense and reason (cf. 2006a: 137ff.).

Bataille’s heterological aesthetics thus identifies two basic moments of negation, two constitutive impossibilities, at the heart of the aesthetic experience: firstly, the sovereign negation of its own autonomy and, secondly, a heteronomy that can be only be grasped in its negative relation to social reality. Bataille’s insistence on negativity, unlike Adorno’s, is not one of pessimism and defeatist elitism, but an attempt at a fundamentally affirmative articulation of the limits of positivity, identity and truth, which are not reducible to capitalist categories. In other words, a heterological aesthetics would constitute an attempt at an unconditional affirmation of the tension between heteronomy and autonomy, a celebration of non-sense and irresponsibility, a sovereign squeal before the canvas.

Conclusion: Heterology as Aesthetics, Problems and (Im)possibilities

The aesthetic, as Bataille conceives of it, does not constitute a form of judgement or an epistemological category. However, the notion of art as the mimesis of the unassimilable implies that it is not completely devoid of epistemological value. Yet this value lies first and foremost in exposing the limit or the absence of the epistemological, in indicating a realm of experience beyond the limits of reason. As Bataille puts it: ‘the only thing [art] can do is direct our attention towards a part of the horizon where everything is in flux’ (2006a: 63). Bataille’s insistence on the absence of an epistemological foundation in art, however, is problematic for two basic reasons: firstly, it would be naïve to simply refute the fact that works of art do have identifiable meanings and objective traits that criticism or philosophy can extract and use for their own epistemological or educative agendas. We cannot simply turn our backs on the demands of reason and language, even if they seem incapable of sufficiently accounting for certain experiences. Here a heterological aesthetics would need to reconcile or at least attest to two competing factors: the inscrutability of the aesthetic experience on the one hand and the paradoxical exigency to mobilize it within discourse on the other. Yet Bataille is adamant that by transposing the experience of aesthetic immediacy into the registers of homogeneous knowledge, we sacrifice what is essential to this experience for the stability and objectivity of knowledge: ‘if, having defined [it] objectively, we can consequently no longer transform this external knowledge into intimate and subjective experience, has this not served to sacrifice the substance for the shadow?’ (2006a: 115–16). ¹³

The second and interconnected problem is posed by the fact that we cannot escape the homogeneous by merely introducing terms such as heterogeneous, aesthetic, etc., which inevitably remain at the service of an epistemological project. Even to posit such terms already gives the outside of thought and reason the semblance of something stable and accessible: ‘the fact of introducing the immediate into the categories of language always creates difficulties … it sets in motion a system that is completely contrary to its nature’ (2006a: 95). This is why, according to Bataille, every account of the heterogeneous must include a disavowal of its own claims as to the ‘nature’ of the heterogeneous, to highlight the impossibility of its own undertaking. Bataille is unambiguous in elucidating what this position implies for art theory and literary criticism: ‘Any commentary which does not simply say that commentaries are useless and impossible moves away from the truth at the very moment when it might come close to itself’ (2006b: 94).

This statement seems to suggest that one should simply stop talking about art and literature once and for all and make a perpetual and irreversible vow of silence. But even a vow of silence needs to be articulated. Bataille’s insistence on the uselessness of commentaries occurs in his own commentary on the works of Blake, which, to be sure, painstakingly uncovers some of the basic traits of Blake’s poetry and thus partakes in rather than halts the philosophical appropriation of art. A heterological aesthetics would therefore neither refute the claim that art contains an epistemological, objective dimension nor deny the value of unearthing or homogenizing it. Neither would it deny that a work of art may be defined according to its use-value, be it in terms of the money it fetches on the art-market, its castigation of social wrongs, the factual knowledge it imparts, or even its specific ‘distribution of the sensible’. What it would show, however, is, firstly, that all these approaches (capitalist, political, philosophical) share a basic premise: here art is always judged according to something exterior to the actual aesthetic experience. Secondly, it would insist on both the importance of acknowledging this experience and the concurrent impossibility of accounting for it within discourse: ‘thought measuring the beyond of things where it has no access is necessarily negative and it cannot take something that it denies for a thing’ (2004: 168). It is thus only with regard to the sovereign power of the work, in relation to its aesthetic immediacy, that ‘all commentaries are useless’. Yet, and this would be the third and most important aspect, the uselessness of commentaries (of a heterological aesthetics) is necessary for the absence of utility, for heterogeneity itself to appear. In other words, to safeguard the aesthetic sovereignty of the work of art, we always need to ‘pull the rug from under [ourselves]’ (2006a: 94) by affirming our own inability to furnish any form of proof regarding its sovereign or heterogeneous status.

A work of art can never be completely reduced to an underlying structure, a deeper meaning or definite purpose that aesthetics somehow has to expose. At the same time it becomes the symbol or meaning for this absence of depth and intelligibility, the sign of a definitive impossibility. For Bataille this constitutes the sovereign, irreducible and infinitely baffling ‘essence’ of art and poetry, which, however, always only appears in relation to what it negates or excludes.